THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

His original idea to do away with Medicare was essentially to give everybody annual cash allowances to pay for medical care. This would have cost money and might have actually done some good. So Crazy Uncle Ben has redone his plan to reduce costs and eliminate benefits.

But last weekend, in a series of interviews, Mr. Carson, who is now narrowly leading in some national polls for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, said he had discarded that idea, and was now presenting a new health plan. It’s less politically toxic, but much less coherent. It is also less likely to lead to the big changes to the health care system he seeks.

Like the original plan, his new one would include health savings accounts, meant to encourage people to pay for their medical care directly. But it would also coexist with existing government health programs — and the degree to which the government would be involved is unclear. It’s very hard to determine who would benefit from the Carson plan or how much it would cost the federal government. It seems possible that it could actually cost more than the current system.

Possible? More like guaranteed. Let us not lose sight of its real purpose.

The new plan would still repeal Obamacare, but apparently not do away with Medicare and Medicaid, the big government health insurance programs that have been around since the 1960s. In previous statements, Mr. Carson has said he’d like to scrap them both as wasteful and inferior to his idea of a lifetime $2,000-per-year health care allowance for every American. On Thursday, Kyle Cheney and Jason Millman at Politico described that plan, including critical voices from Republican health policy analysts, who worried that ending the popular Medicaid and Medicare programs would be both politically and practically problematic.

“No, that — that’s the old plan. That’s been gone for several months now,” Mr. Carson told Mr. Wallace on Sunday, adding that he’d recently consulted with “a lot of economists and various people” who helped him shape his new plan.

Like all Conservative economic plans the financing of all the magic continues to go unexplained. This makes sense if you remember that the purpose is not to provide health care to any of the undeserving masses but to destroy Medicare/Medicaid forever. Now it all makes sense.